Hello, bee friends!

Today's patch includes load time improvements and an engine version upgrade.

The change that's likely to matter most to players is a change to how the most common game assets are loaded. By instantiating every cell, particle effect, bee, and hat once when a new game is started, brief pauses during first load no longer happen during gameplay. There's a tiny increase in delay between zooming in after clicking "Start new hive" and zooming "through" the menu background, but since they all happen at once, it's one 0.25 second pause (depending on load speed) rather than the dozen or so that were occurring separately.

Because this load time is never visible when running the game in the Godot editor and because pauses weren't noticeable when running release builds on my main dev machine, the problem wasn't something I had good awareness of until mid January! Apologies to anybody who's been negatively affected by it.

Upgrading to Godot 3.2 has been a mostly smooth process - a few material tweaks were needed to compensate for renderer changes, and so on. There may be some performance increases on lower end systems, but broadly speaking, there shouldn't be any significant changes.

Godot 3.2 itself has many fixes and additions (including an improvement from me \o/), but since Hive Time was already functional/didn't have big outstanding bugs, and I didn't have any major changes planned for this patch, there's not a lot for Hive Time to specifically benefit from.

Enjoy!

Full changelog:

• Added a pre-game check to ensure all cell types, particle effects and bees have been instantiated once to reduce pauses while loading resources during gameplay
• Added first pass on a system for scripting behaviours and events for the second trailer
• Refactored vignette activation to allow specific or arbitrary vignettes to be triggered via code
• Refactored HUD hiding code
• Replaced Camera.project_position() workaround with new API in Godot 3.2 (upstream #29248)
• Updated title of 'No goke' vignette
• Updated camera attachment point for bee follow cam
• Updated game camera environment colour to match main menu when quitting to prevent a green flicker in some cases
• Updated default hive sound volume to its original value of 0.3 Updated most materials to retain visual consistency after Godot 3.2 upgrade
• Updated main menu slider theme to be consistent after Godot 3.2 upgrade
• Updated liquid resource materials to be more rough/less reflective
• Updated timing of settings menus' fade in
• Updated version check to show latest build notice when current version can not be determined when version checks are enabled
• Updated default camera environment colour to match main menu background when quitting from an OS quit signal
• Updated default camera environment colour to only match main menu when quitting from main menu
• Upgraded to Godot 3.2
• Fixed effect label minimum width being too small in Godot 3.2
• Fixed cell mouse out events clearing build previews when radial menus are displayed in Godot 3.2
• Fixed defence coverage indicators being rendered outside the coverage map in the defence screen
• Fixed hive sounds returning to full volume when leaving inspect mode or closing an event/vignette regardless of zoom level
• Fixed a case where switching roles in the bee activity screen could result in an infinite loop in Godot 3.2
• Fixed a case where switching input modes in the foraging screen would reset input mode to select in Godot 3.2
• Fixed warnings when camera zoom is less than or equal to 0.1 in Godot 3.2
• Fixed case where quitting from the main menu could result in the version checker thread not joining
• Fixed fonts not being loaded correctly on MacOS after Godot 3.2 engine upgrade